Banking Review

Mint.com sold to Intuit in US$170m deal. Will we ever see an equivalent launched by an Australian company?

Personal financial management service provider Mint.com has been sold to Intuit (the owner of Quicken) in a deal worth US$170 million.

Mint.com was privately owned, recently securing US$14 million in additional VC funding.

Mint.com makes money by charging banks and other service providers a fee when customers decide to switch providers as a result of a savings recommendation from Mint. Mint.com founder Aaron Patzer says the deal will see the service remain free for users, and the acceleration of new product functionality.

The deal makes sense for Intuit, whose monthly fee model was under pressure from Mint.

In just two years Mint.com managed to acquire over 1.5 million users, and more interestingly, is now sampling data from about 2 per cent of online US households, making for some interesting trend watching.

Australian use of personal financial management sites has been slowly growing, but is hampered by the fact that not all banks enable feeds of their data to be automatically provided to such sites.

An Australian version of Mint.com could gain traction in the current climate where consumers are looking for ways to trim the household budget. The question is, would our local VC market back such a venture?

Mint.com currently attracts about one million unique US visitors a month. In Australia, even our most popular financial comparison sites are only generating about 100,000 unique visitors a month.

It’s a big leap of faith to assume the money saving benefits of personal financial management sites would translate into a significantly higher number of users, and ultimately a strong return on investment.

Despite rumours of interest from Yahoo, Mint.com competitor Wesabe continues to push ahead with its white label offering, which so far is being used by two US credit unions and UK publisher the Daily Telegraph.

Wesabe is notably absent from the line-up at this months Finovate conference in New York, however Intuit will be there to address an audience already lining up to drink the PFM Kool-Aid.

I’ll also be in attendance and look forward to bringing you all the news from the event.